Why have multiple attacks succeeded in France and yet in England we've managed to escape a major attack since 7/7? Better intelligence, or more of an issue of border security?

my guess, neither. i think the specific history of french colonialism is a better place to start looking personally. That plus the sort of French secularism that led the the Hebdo cartoons and which is so incompatible with Islamic extremism.

Here we have no principles, we just think, vaguely, that people should be nice to each other to the extent thats possible, and ignore each other when niceness is too difficult.

There's a study from about a decade ago wrt terror in the middle east which found a large cohort of well educated upper/middle class participants... motivated primarily by ideology and political grievances.

There's a study from about a decade ago wrt terror in the middle east which found a large cohort of well educated upper/middle class participants... motivated primarily by ideology and political grievances.

Bin Laden himself being surely the most obvious example - son of a billionaire building tycoon, degree in civil engineering.

As for "why France and not elsewhere"... would the French army's involvement in Mali a few years ago be a good reason.

Does France have a more extensive recent history of military intervention in majority-Muslim parts of the world than the UK, though? Surely not, if you include Kosovo and Iraq. So why are so many more attacks happening there than here? Is it just that our spy agencies have got it together better than theirs?

That plus the sort of French secularism that led the the Hebdo cartoons and which is so incompatible with Islamic extremism.

Also, this sounds a bit naive. France's tradition of what you might call robust secularism is clearly extremely compatible with Islamic extremism - to the extent that the two tendencies feed off each other symbiotically.

It's also worth quoting this from the Guardian piece:

In recent years, as elsewhere in Europe and the Islamic world, rigorous and intolerant strands of Islamic observance have made inroads, as well as, more recently, a new, debased, ultra-violent “gangsta Jihad” culture attractive to a young and often marginalised constituency.

Which is basically true, isn't it? Whenever details about the personal lives of the guys who commit these atrocities comes out, they're very often not exactly paragons of Islamic observance. If they weren't going on jihad they'd be sticking up off-licences and selling smack on street corners. The Guardian bit above says the truck driver was known to local cops as a thug and a thief, but they had no indication he might fancy himself as a sacred warrior of Allah. Religion clearly has something to do with it, but it's all horribly mixed up in a matrix of race issues, ghettoisation, social exclusion and poverty, and probably also mental illness.

Edit: as the article points out, this is quite a recent development and is mainly a French and Belgian thing, quite distinct from the figure of the erudite scholar-bomber.

The problem is you have no principles, no point of view, no centre of gravity. Just a grab bag of prerehearsed speeches which you shoehorn into every conversation regardless of context. It's quite frustrating.

Europeans find themselves in an intellectual milieu dominated by the dogmas of very disputable conceptions of universalism and cosmopolitanism, based on alleged “European values”, which are unfortunately, as it should be now clear to everybody, open to mass abuse and exploitation... The ubiquitous and immediate rhetoric of “unity” (nous sommes unis), ironically suggests that such unity also encompasses, if not the terrorists themselves, practically all other elements which have allowed the emergence of a home-grown Islamism and terrorism on European soil, thus indirectly suggesting that things will continue exactly on the very same trajectory that brought the situation to the current point.